James Bulger: 20 years on Denis Fergus is still looking for ‘justice’

JAMES Bulger’s father has marked two decades since his young son was murdered by children with a book. In it he alludes to the remourse felt by John Venables. James Bulger’s mother, now remarried and called Denise Fergus, says she “wants justice”. As ever , what she says is broadcast in the mainstream media.

Venables and Robert Thompson, both aged 10, were convicted of killing two-year-old James in Bootle, Merseyside in 1993. They tortured him. Then they left him on a train track. The train hit him.

The tabloid angle has been clear from day one: Venables and Thompson are more guilty because they were children.

Mrs Fergus seems to have a particular hatred of Venables. In 2001, Venables was released from Red Bank secure unit in St Helens, Merseyside. In 2010, he was recalled when he pleaded guilty to downloading and distributing indecent images of children. For that, he can have no excuse. His crime only came to light when, fearing his cover had been blown, he called the police. They went to his home, where they found him trying to erase his computer’s hard drive.

Mrs Fergus marks the second decade of her son’s death by telling media:

“Do not release him. I still don’t think he’s capable of walking amongst other people. He will do someone else harm. It’s in him, and I strongly believe if he’s released he will go on to hurt someone else.”

She adds:

“Why should I let it go? They took the most precious thing away from me. I won’t let it go. And I’ve always said if there’s a fight there to be fought, then I’ll fight it for James. If I let go of that now I will feel I’ve let James down. That is something I’ll never do, I’ll never let James down. I want justice for James. He’s never had justice.”

What is the justice she craves? That life means life? Some would argue that summary justice be meted out on the killers? Fergus adds:

“I did warn [the authorities] that one of them or both of them would go on to reoffend, and I was proven right with Venables.”

Venables and Thompson are watched closely by the authorities. They cannot be watched 24-hours a day. They have new identities. Their crime was unusual. A ten-year-old killer is not a common thing. Thank god. But should they not have a chance to atone and be punished? The age of criminal responsibility in England and Wales is 10 years old.

In 2011, the Royal Society published a report. It said that at age 10 parts of the brain connected with decision-making and judgement are still developing.

Professor Nicholas Mackintosh, who chaired the working group that compiled the study, said: “There’s now incontrovertible evidence that the brain continues to develop throughout adolescence.” He said some regions of the brain – including parts responsible for decision-making and impulse control – are not fully mature “until at least the age of 20″. “Now that clearly has some implications for how adolescents behave,” he said.

The age of criminal responsibility is 18 in Belgium and 16 in Spain.

John Venables and Robert Thompson must keep their past secret. They must never return to Merseyside without State approval. Is that a normal life?

In sentencing Enables for the child porn, Mr Justice Bean stated:

“It would be wrong, in my view, for the sentence you receive today for child pornography offences to be increased by reason of the fact that you are one of the two people who, when much younger, carried out the horrific murder of two year old James Bulger. But there is a significant difference between your case and that of a typical offender. In an ordinary case, I would be telling the defendant that after serving half of the sentence of imprisonment which I imposed, he would be released on licence. That does not apply in your case…

“The appropriate sentence after a trial would therefore have been 3 years, but you are entitled to credit of one third for the fact that you made immediate admissions when interviewed about the respective offences.”

The judge stuck to the law. No special case was made. But this is a specil case. David James Smith had followed the case closely. He wrote in the Sunday Times:

From the moment I heard about Venables’ interest in child pornography, I was cast back to the still-unanswered questions about the murder of James Bulger — why it happened, and the extent to which the attack may have been sexually motivated. I was reminded, too, of concerns about the way in which Venables and Thompson were overseen after their release on “life licence” in 2001, when an extraordinary bureaucracy was created just for them.

The then home secretary, David Blunkett, added his own conditions to their licence and insisted on being fed daily reports so that he could keep tabs on what the two young men were up to. The bureaucrats were so desperate to protect their projects — Venables and Thompson — and watch their own backs that they routinely deceived and withheld information about them from people who ought to have been told.

The deception was mainly intended to protect Venables’ new identity from becoming known, but has been described to me by someone close to the case as “a conspiracy of lies” that began to unravel when Venables started getting into trouble, at least two years before he was discovered with child pornography. He, too, lied to people who ought to have seen through his deception.

His offender manager gave him money out of her own pocket when he claimed to be broke (it later turned out Venables was buying cocaine and “meow meow” — mephedrone), and went round to play darts with Venables at his flat to stave off his loneliness. She noted that he was on the internet a lot. Unbeknown to her, he was also visiting Merseyside, breaking one of the key conditions of his parole, which was to keep him away from the city where the parents of his victim still lived. He ought to have been sent straight back to prison for that alone, but somehow nobody knew what he was up to.

This has since been investigated by an independent adviser, Sir David Omand, who was asked by the justice secretary, Kenneth Clarke, to find out what went wrong. His 114-page report, published last November, is very kind and effectively exonerates all those involved, refusing to judge them with hindsight.

I would be very surprised if Venables is not released this year. Again, her solicitor should be upfront with Mrs Fergus – she has no power to stop release of an offender. No-one has apart from the individual members of the Parole Board (even the Justice Secretary cannot block a release). She is asking for things she is not legally entitled to (and should never be entitled to).
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Either people are not being honest with her or she is listening to the wrong people.

R B

This case has always made me uncomfortable. Not just because of the horrible facts (I’ve personally never doubted there was a degree of sexual motivation) but because of the treatment of Thompson and Venerables – then and since.
In the UK, over 50 children a year die at the hands of another person. How many of their killers could the public name?

Virgil

RB, I respectfully disagree. Don’t be so sure about that sexual motivation: Alan Williams, the pathologist, ruled the physical evidence to be inconclusive. I doubt there was a sexual motive, but regardless, none of us are more qualified than the pathologist. He was cautious about ascribing a sexual motive to the crime and so should we be.
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In my opinion, the most plausible explanation for why James Bulger died is a PTSD-induced panic/rage reaction on Venables’ part. Google “Private Needham’s War” for a traguc story about what untreated severe PTSD can lead people to do: the violence can be extreme, lethal, savage, and horrific. But there’s an evolutionary purpose for this! Such sudden, quicksilver outpourings of unparalleled violence can literally save our lives in life-and-death emergencies! The problem is if the trauma-induced rage reaction is not allowed to complete its cycle at the right time and pointed at the right target, it can become stored up in the cells of the body and suddenly erupt like a volcano, terrifyingly, at the wrong time, directed at the wrong target. That’s what happened to poor Private Needham and the girlfriend he brutally killed.
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I believe Venables intentionally threw a few stones and paint at James, and when James started shrieking, screaming, and crying hysterically after the paint landed in his eye, that triggered panic – consequently rage – consequently violence of the most extreme sort on Venables’ part.
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David James Smith believes Venables was sexually abused, but I’m not sure. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Even without sexual abuse, he was physically and emotionally abused by his own mother, badly bullied by other chldren in school and around the neighbourhood, and was reported by Smith and Gitta Sereny to have undergone an operation for his squint: that very operation is known to trauma experts to often trigger terrible PTSD in children (the child’s eye is sliced and diced – in the wild, such an act would signify a deadly predator attack), and if the child comes from a dysfunctional family, the probability of a bad outcome skyrockets.
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I doubt Thompson would’ve become violent had he not been in Venables’ company that day. Had Venables not been with Thompson, he probably wouldn’t have committed such an exceptionally violent act either but he still would, I believe, have been violent – he already had manifested violence towards a classmate.
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Pretty much everything Denise Fergus says in this piece (like every piece the tabloids write on her behalf and have her sign her name to) is vacuous, ill-thought-out rubbish, and I have a very different theory as to what caused Venables to dabble in child porn. I very much doubt that he’s a pedophile – the same tabloids that vilify him point with feigned horror at his canoodlings with various adult one-night-stands and adult prostitutes (not to mention his alleged crush on Rachel Ifon, a woman two years older than him). It doesn’t seem to occur to them that by their own description, he doesn’t come off as a typical pedo. The very small number of violent porn pics he was found with also undermines the argument for sadistic pedophilia. Here’s my alternate theory:
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Without a clear sense of identity, we are paralyzed. If we cannot forge our own identities, we simply cannot function at all. A total failure to create our own identity means we can only fall back on a kind of generic identity, an identity based entirely on what other people say about us. And for Venables, that could only mean one thing: the Depraved Monster image the tabloids have created for him.
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And what is the hallmark, the ultimate signifier of depravity in the first decade of the 21st century? An interest in child porn, of course. Pedophilia is our modern day “crimen exceptem,” the exceptional crime, the crime of crimes, in regards to which all normal feelings of rationality and calm go out the window. Pedophilia is synonymous with depravity in the modern mind, so we shouldn’t be surprised to see a mentally ill, seriously damaged young man – a pariah, a despised outcast, isolated, no real friends, psychologically falling to pieces – in the wake of his failure to create a solid identity for himself, simply lapse and collapse back into the pre-fabricated identity created by the tabloids with the enthusiastic and neverending assistance of the vengeful Denise Fergus. This is, I suspect, the real cause of Venables’ downloading of child porn. Not interest in fucking children per se, but a subconscious need to finally merge and fuse his real self with the fictive demonic self portrayed by the tabloids. The very small amount of serious Level 4 porn on his computer lends credence to this theory.
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If Denise Fergus really wants to ensure that Venables won’t harm a child sexually, the best thing she could do is shut up and finally fade into the background. For it’s perfectly possible – I’d say highly likely – that her and the tabloids’ non-stop hate campaign is what instigated Venables’ psychological collapse and downward spiral into the sordid realm of child porn to begin with.
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But there now exists technology, similar to a polygraph, that can measure quite accurately one’s level of sexual arousal when looking at different images. It would be possible to use such technology, I imagine, to see if Venables is really a pedo or not. If my hunch is correct, he will not score highly on levels of sexual arousal when shown pics of sadistic, violent child porn. Some of the rabid pitchfork wavers who want him dead, on the other hand, I strongly suspect would manifest much higher levels of sexual arousal towards such sick pics than Venables himself.

Virgil

Denise Fergus claimed: “I did warn [the authorities] that one of them or both of them would go on to reoffend, and I was proven right with Venables.”
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But obviously she was only “proven right” if the usual interpretation holds true: Venables is a deep-seated pedo with an insatiable urge to fuck and torture little kids.
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If, however, my alternate theory is closer to the truth – psychological collapse and “rebirth” as the Depraved Monster the media always insisted he was – then Denise Fergus hasn’t been “proven right” in the slightest! And not only not proven right in any way, shape, or form – but it would be like the stove (not just the pot) calling the kettle black!
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Since Fergus hasn’t actually been “proven right” – and can’t be proven right unless serious scientific and psychological testing confirms that he is a hardcore pedophile – she’s gloating more than a little prematurely. My alternate theory – which points the finger of blame squarely back at the vicious demonizing tabloids she’s gotten into bed with 20 years – is at least as plausible a reading of the available evidence as the standard theory. So no, Denise, you most certainly have not been “proven right.”
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Nor can we possibly infer anything from this case about how well or how poorly rehabilitation of juvenile offenders in general works – since in any other case similar to this one, there is no media circus and neverending tabloid hate campaign involved. So obviously even if both Thompson and Venables went on a shooting rampage tomorrow – that could still tell us NOTHING about the efficacy of rehabilitation for any other juvenile criminal – since the media vilification, neverending dredging up of the past, and need to assume fake identities simply wouldn’t apply.

dairy

your posts are extraordinary in that they lack any sort of acknowledgement of the fact that Denise Fergus’s son was taken from her and murdered in the most horrible and brutal way. You may call her irrational but the emotional damage done to her is evident and it is not surprising in the least that she is still calling for justice. A part of her must still feel guilty (rightly or wrongly) for momentarily letting James out of her sight in a crowded mall. The focus should be on what to do about this person and whether or not he is – according to experts – fit to be let out into the general public domain again, not on criticising a still-grieving mother. I think she will know that her words will not have much effect in the long run, but what do you expect her to do? Sit back, pat them on the head and say that she forgives them…? I don’t know many parents who would be capable of that.

Emma

Virgil, I think your comments are as much conjecture as Denise Fergus’s assumptions. Venables might or might not be a paedophile – we have no way of knowing, not being privy to any psychiatric reports. Certainly there was a pattern of disordered behaviour – including online correspondence with a convicted paedophile.
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The only thing the Parole Board need to consider is whether the risk of releasing Jon Venables is such that he is a clear threat to life and limb and whether he can be safely managed under supervision. This is probably why Denise is talking about secure psychiatric care – she must have been told that is the only way Jon Venables will be able to be kept locked up. But to section him, it must be proved by more than one doctor that he is an imminent threat either to the public or to himself.
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His release is virtually inevitable in my opinion unless he’s certifiably cuckoo.

Oscar

Of course the death (and murder) of a child is horrendous but these parents seem to be driven by the media hate campaigns against the 2 killers who have served their time. Few people could understand that the two murderers were deprived of a childhood themselves and perhaps Veneables child pron offense was caused by this. It’s non excuse but a possible cause.

What does she mean by “justice for her child”?. He’s dead, he cannot receive justice. He’s gone.

The world is full of millions of people who are the victims of injustice but this woman seems to believe the government should bend to her will, for her case to be made special and unique. Just because someone’s child has been murdered doesn’t make that woman a saint either. There’s a touch of killer porn obsession with her continued media appearances.
To be honest she gives me a sickly feeling. I had a close relative whose daughter was murdered in horrific circumstances 50 years ago.
She died recently having never said a word to the media despite requests. She wished to be left alone with her memories and once told me the idea of speaking to a trashy tabloid would be like defiling her daughter’s memory

dairy

people grieve in different ways and – as I said previously – no doubt there is an element of guilt with Denise Fergus that she was not vigilant enough at the time. She obviously doesn’t feel that Thompson and Venables were punished sufficiently for the crime – that’s her opinion and she is entitled to it, just as you are entitled to plead for leniency on their behalf. Nobody has said she is a pleasant person either – what relevance does that have to this case? And just because your relative reacted in a certain way doesn’t mean that everyone else has to behave that way or that if they don’t, they are wrong…?
at the end of the day, the justice system will decide by itself what is best for these two individuals, not Denise Fergus. But it was the justice system which introduced the American concept of “victim statements” to the proceedings and, as such, Denise Fergus is therefore entitled to speak. If the media chooses to publicise what she has to say, that’s up to them. Maybe your argument should be with the media for giving Mrs Fergus airtime? However, when I last looked, we still had free speech in this country, which – along with giving a murder victim’s mother an opportunity to vent her spleen – also gives you the opportunity to say your piece and have a go at her.
you can’t have it both ways.

Oscar

I do not believe my relative’s grief should be emulated by anyone else but the public has a right not to be fed this woman’s grief over and over just because it flogs newspapers.
I use my relative’s example as someone who had dignity and quite frankly, we see little of other people who have been through horrific murders continually speaking to the media. Of course it’s the media’s fault -they are indulging her and giving her some ridiculous notion that if the killers were strung from lamp posts she may find that bizarre undefined thing ‘closure’ .
She appears to be quite a nasty person and that doesn’t mean she should be indulged and we all must suffer along with her.
And her continued bleatings to the media remind others who are trying to forget the horrific things that happened to them as in my relative’s case- she gave up looking at the media 30 years ago because she couldn’t stand the endless tales
that ARE like death porn. Unless you have become so used to Britain’s ugly tabloid culture you think it’s normal. She should get counseling and give us all a rest. This wasn’t the murder of the century. and it’s no worse or better than any other awful crime.

dairy

it was to her….

Emma

Mrs Fergus is only setting herself up for more disappointment. As I said, I’ll be bloody surprised if Venables spends much longer in prison and when he’s released we’ll get the ‘they didn’t listen to me – I spent all that time telling the Parole Board what I think and they ignored me’. Well that’s because she doesn’t have any power to keep him inside. She has as much power to do that as any one of us. She’s utterly deluded.

Virgil

Dairy, Denise Fergus’ supporters express their support by buying up copies of tabloids whenever she vents, and tuning in whenever she appears on television.
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But I’m sure she has just as many detractors as supporters, but they’re mostly invisible. How is Oscar to express his disagreement without actually disagreeing? You seem to want only her supporters and not her detractors to have a say. You also seem not to realize that much of the hostlity and disgust towards her is fairly recent: there’s a big difference betweeen attacking her 20 years later and attacking her at the time of the tragedy. She should not be entitled to control the cultural conversation forever.
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Oscar is right that she thinks government should bend to her will, that she comes off as a thoroughly nasty person, and that there’s a touch of killer porn to her rather sick vendetta. The simple fact of the matter is, she DID receive justice for James. If a substantial majority of the nations of the world would not have prosecuted James’ killers due to their young age – and that IS the reality – then she has no case. They were prosecuted and convicted, in most countries they wouldn’t have been. No injustice was done to her. She has been led on but vested interests with the sinister agenda of keeping her hate and bitterness alive forever because it’s a cash cow.

Virgil

“To be honest she gives me a sickly feeling.”
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Oscar, she is quite literally the only parent of a murder victim I’ve ever felt revulsion towards. At first I felt guilty, but now everything about her makes my skin crawl. I seriously think she’s more mentally disturbed now than Robert Thompson, and perhaps even Jon Venables. Of course, the real culprit is the tabloids cold-bloodedly exploiting her, but still. She IS creepy, she DOES give one the creeps.
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So vicious and relentless is she, she has actually managed to do what I would’ve thought was impossible: make me feel more sympathy for Venables than herself!

dairy

Virgil… I never stated that only her supporters should have a say, so I don’t know where you got that from..! I am no particular fan of Denise Fergus as a person – she doesn’t come over as a particularly pleasant or attractive personality, but there again, she is only ever featured in conjunction with her murdered son – not many laughs on that subject, I am sure you will agree with that at least…
I just do not see the need for vitriol against a grieving mother – deluded or otherwise – from people who don’t know her or understand how she is obviously not coping with the loss of her son after 20 years.
I think Emma is correct that she is deluded if she thinks the authorities will take any notice of her, but to say that she is more mentally disturbed than either Venables or Thompson just shows a remarkable degree of ignorance and stupidity – she may not be to your liking and annoy you with her TV appearances, but she is not a murderer and whether you like it or not, that is what these two people are.

Emma

She’s a deeply unpleasant person and may have been whether she suffered a horrendous loss or not. Again – we have no way of knowing. She is certainly not above judgement – her behaviour is exasperating and probably self-defeating. There isn’t a single person with any authority in the criminal justice system who will take the blindest bit of notice of her. Nor should they.

MB

Interesting interviews with Dominic Lloyd, Robert Thompson’s solicitors on the Liverpool Echo website: